"We are born, meant to die. If I am to die, then let it be with a sword in my hand, my enemies at my feet, and my blood on my body. Come forward, come forward, come forward! And let us all meet in bloody combat."-The Rose Lord, William Rose.

We've explored, exemplified, and confirmed the idea that human concepts are completely subjective, therefore, irrational. I say we go further. The epistemical idea that knowledge, or concepts such as meaning or value, can be justified, but not always by logical method, sometimes spiritualism, or something equally irrational.

Can an irrational idea be justified irrationally? Of those who claim to understand any concepts, or have any knowledge, have gained this "knowledge" through entirely subjective observations and procedures, could any ideas have any value at all, including the idea of "value?"

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

Phaze wrote:This thread is making me dizzy, running around in circles.

We've explored, exemplified, and confirmed the idea that human concepts are completely subjective, therefore, irrational. I say we go further. The epistemical idea that knowledge, or concepts such as meaning or value, can be justified, but not always by logical method, sometimes spiritualism, or something equally irrational.

Can an irrational idea be justified irrationally? Of those who claim to understand any concepts, or have any knowledge, have gained this "knowledge" through entirely subjective observations and procedures, could any ideas have any value at all, including the idea of "value?"

I don't think it's true that human concepts are completely subjective, or that a subjective concept is necessarily irrational, let alone completely irrational.

Most people aren't scientists, but they still live their lives by gathering what you could call data--making observations about themselves, others, and the situation that surrounds them. It's a far cry from objective testing under a peer-reviewed, double-blind process. But neither is it a random, blind flailing with no connection to reality (except when people try to hit on someone).

No organism can survive for long without paying at least *some* attention to the objective situation around it. You might say that science is an attempt to discipline and harness the innate ability we have to at least sometimes face reality .

And science, too, takes some benefit from subjectivity--in the sense of the desire to see what doesn't seem (or seem to currently exist). This is what Einstein meant when he said that imagination was more important than knowledge--not that knowledge isn't important or even essential, but that without imagination you cannot acquire new knowledge.

In medieval times philosophers used to assume that everything that could be known had already been discovered, and that the most important task was now to simply preserve that and rediscover lost knowledge. It took a long time for it to sink in that even the wisest people of ancient times only knew so much.

It's not that knowledge is irrational (although I'd say abstract concepts, by very definition, are). It's that we can't truely confirm anything we know, as what once seemed like a solid theory can eventually evaporate into a more questions due to new discoveries or ideas. Sometimes, it's not even a new discovery. You tell a young child about Santa Claus. That child knows, Santa Claus exists. Does Santa exist?

Similar misconceptions can befall any group of people, either because of false information, or because their perception of the events are subjective (our 5 senses give us information, and our brain interprets it, things can, and often will, particularly with things like optical illusions, be decieved.)

Similarly, a person could simply refuse to believe something until they don't, or otherwise reject the information they're getting.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

Phaze wrote:It's not that knowledge is irrational (although I'd say abstract concepts, by very definition, are). It's that we can't truely confirm anything we know, as what once seemed like a solid theory can eventually evaporate into a more questions due to new discoveries or ideas. Sometimes, it's not even a new discovery. You tell a young child about Santa Claus. That child knows, Santa Claus exists. Does Santa exist?

Similar misconceptions can befall any group of people, either because of false information, or because their perception of the events are subjective (our 5 senses give us information, and our brain interprets it, things can, and often will, particularly with things like optical illusions, be decieved.)

Similarly, a person could simply refuse to believe something until they don't, or otherwise reject the information they're getting.

I think that the things we know fall into a very wide range of categories. Obviously one would not consider the case of Santa Claus in the same class of questions as "will this new medicine affect this disease?" or "what foods are healthier than others?" or "is this a good way to teach reading?" or "what kind of mileage does this car get"?

It's true that we can't be certain to achieve perfect objectivity in anything. In fact, we know that our understanding of things will always be inadequate--if it wasn't, we would never progress; we make progress to a new understanding, but eventually realize that was inadequate, and so we move forward.

Some theories, once disproved, do "evaporate," but just as often they remain as the foundation for the new understanding, or remain valid in other contexts. Sometimes you'll hear people say that Einstein "overthrew our Newtonian view of the universe," which makes it sound like dropping a rock on your foot or getting into a car crash is really just some kind of Matrix-like illusion that Einstein exposed as phony.

But of course, what Einstein discovered wasn't that Newton had it all wrong, but that his description of the universe was incomplete and inadequate to explain certain observations. Much of our engineering, not to mention our society and our daily lives, however, still goes according to the perfectly valid theories Newton arrived at in the 17th century.

You'll also hear the same things said about quantum physics--that because our observations of matter at a fundamentally small level are inherently uncertain, how can we be sure of anything? Again, I suggest trying the old rock-on-the-foot test, to see if the rock will spontaneously jump a foot to the left this time, and miss.

(There's an old Zen parable about the student who thought he'd impress his master with his new wisdom. He told the master in some detail that everything was an illusion and that nothing truly existed. The master was silent for a few moments and then, without warning, hauled off and smacked the student. The master watched the student hop around in rage for a few more quiet moments before asking, "If nothing exists, where did this anger come from?")

You don't seem to have a singular point, rather, you seem to be arguing each of mine individually. I agree that knowledge is ever-changing and ever-evolving.

gramma wrote:We've explored, exemplified, and confirmed the idea that human concepts are completely subjective, therefore, irrational. I say we go further. The epistemical idea that concepts such as meaning or value, can be justified, but not always by logical method, sometimes spiritualism, or something equally irrational.

Can an irrational idea be justified irrationally? Of those who claim to understand any concepts, or have any knowledge, have gained this "knowledge" through entirely subjective observations and procedures, could any ideas have any value at all, including the idea of "value?"

This is the topic at hand This is what I'd genuinely like to hear more on.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

Phaze wrote:You don't seem to have a singular point, rather, you seem to be arguing each of mine individually. I agree that knowledge is ever-changing and ever-evolving.

gramma wrote:We've explored, exemplified, and confirmed the idea that human concepts are completely subjective, therefore, irrational. I say we go further. The epistemical idea that concepts such as meaning or value, can be justified, but not always by logical method, sometimes spiritualism, or something equally irrational.

Can an irrational idea be justified irrationally? Of those who claim to understand any concepts, or have any knowledge, have gained this "knowledge" through entirely subjective observations and procedures, could any ideas have any value at all, including the idea of "value?"

This is the topic at hand This is what I'd genuinely like to hear more on.

I guess I have difficulty clearly labelling ideas, observations, or other elements of cognition as being (sharply) either subjective or objective, either rational or irrational. It's not that I don't see the difference, but rather that I see these elements as existing within a sliding scale.

We can conceive of a pure objectivity or subjectivity, but it seems to me actually obtaining either is impossible--we can never have pure objectivity because our cognitive capacities are limited, whereas we can never have pure subjectivity because our cognition nevertheless exists in a physical world.

That's what I've been trying to get across, too. There's no one way or the other. There's both or nothing. We know what we think and we think what we know.It relates to my ultimate theory of the nature of the universe, which I will not discuss, now.

since all mentioned topics have benn talked over a billion times, here is another one that hasn't been mentioned much yet, What makes us human?

"We are born, meant to die. If I am to die, then let it be with a sword in my hand, my enemies at my feet, and my blood on my body. Come forward, come forward, come forward! And let us all meet in bloody combat."-The Rose Lord, William Rose.

ChronoX wrote:since all mentioned topics have benn talked over a billion times, here is another one that hasn't been mentioned much yet, What makes us human?

Doujinshi. Of all animals, only homo sapiens creates doujinshi. This revelation was my favorite part of COMIC PARTY.

--C.

P.S. If the camera had been allowed to run five more minutes in THE END OF EVANGELION, you would have seen Shinji get off Asuka, construct a crude printing press out of wreckage washed up on the beach, and then start printing a doujinshi. It would have, of course, been a doujinshi about Asuka.

"We are born, meant to die. If I am to die, then let it be with a sword in my hand, my enemies at my feet, and my blood on my body. Come forward, come forward, come forward! And let us all meet in bloody combat."-The Rose Lord, William Rose.

ChronoX wrote:what is Doujinshi? i don't speak but a few words of Japanese

Doujinshi are the self-published comics that Japanese fans produce (technically, doujinshi just refers to small circles of enthusiasts, who could also put out stuff like mugs, posters, toys, stationery--you might call it fan merchandising).

It is a huge scene in Japan, where perhaps as many as twenty thousand individual doujinshi are produced each year--there are not only gigantic conventions for them (350,000 attend the twice-yearly Comic Market, which is only the biggest), but several chain stores that specialize in selling them retail.

Most doujinshi are parodies of existing characters--EVA produced a huge number of doujinshi. Gainax started off in doujinshi and senior members there continued to contribute to them after they went pro; both Anno and Sadamoto drew stories for the first issue of Kenichi Sonoda's doujinshi CHOSEN AME in 1992.

They are an important "incubator" for people to turn professional in Japan; manga artists such as CLAMP, Yasuhiro Nightow, and Rikdo Koshi all came out of doujinshi, just to name a very few.

Hey, I don't make Doujinshi, but I think I'm still human. :? Don't put down people who can't draw.

So, what makes us human? Technically, it's in the genetic information, but we're beginning to muddle around the definition of human, like all things as I said previously. I guess you could say that as long as we think we're human, we are. Maybe we've deluded ourselves so much, thinking we're so special that we begin to make all the excuses in the world to prove we are human. You can have a man with a completely replaced, unhuman body, and he declares himself human. You can have two week old clump of multiplying cells, and you'll say that it is human. You can have a brain-dead man on life support, and you say that it is human. We'll go to the wildest extremes and say that humans have souls, to try to claim who is human and what is not. But do we really know what human is?Does it make a difference?

In answering the question, the most general and popular statement I can make is that anything with the remnants of a, once, living human (or human in the making) can be - but might not be - considered human.

MAGI wrote:Hey, I don't make Doujinshi, but I think I'm still human. :? Don't put down people who can't draw.

I would never do that. Remember the words of Kubo to Tanaka in OTAKU NO VIDEO: "But who's going to do the animation? We can't draw!"

--C.

"...The true theme of 'Eva' is not release from introversion through self-assertion, but self-justification of introversion made to look like release from introversion. The last scene of the final episode, where Shinji shouts, 'It's OK for me to be here!' can be considered incontrovertible evidence in support of this point. If Shinji were really freed from his introversion, he should instead shout, 'It's OK for me to connect with other people!'..."

:P {That's right--]:? {No, that's not what I'm trying to get at. The thing is... It's open to interpretation. Don't forget the few who believe that humans are worse than apes. They, themselves, are human, ironically, but they freely admit that. Now tell me that they don't have the audacity to claim they are better than apes, and that they're not human. Anyway, the thing I was getting at... It's open to interpretation.]

Humans are animals. That's what it breaks down to. That's all we are and that's all we'll ever be. We all have basic animalistic instincts. We are capable of great deeds of kindness and also great atrosicities, in the name of something or just because. So, what separates us from other animals? What makes us any "better" than a dog or a gorilla? Abstract thought. It's not that it makes us any "better", it makes us different, that's all. We have the ability to understand the world and conceptualize it. That's what makes us different.

"Everyone but me has gone fucking nuts. I'm the eye of the goddam storm." - Tycho, Penny Arcade (Or a very irrate Fuyutsuki)

Karma Burn wrote:Humans are animals. That's what it breaks down to. That's all we are and that's all we'll ever be. We all have basic animalistic instincts. We are capable of great deeds of kindness and also great atrosicities, in the name of something or just because. So, what separates us from other animals? What makes us any "better" than a dog or a gorilla? Abstract thought. It's not that it makes us any "better", it makes us different, that's all. We have the ability to understand the world and conceptualize it. That's what makes us different.

Thats what I was trying to tell you stupid humans all along!!!! :evil:

Don't ban me for a limited time! Either ban me for good or let me be. (I only hold grudges for a few years lol)